Monday 4 October 2010

Oracle announce MySQL 5.5 RC

Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, underlined Oracle’s investment in MySQL and demonstrated how Oracle is making MySQL better every day. He announced the immediate availability of the release candidate version of MySQL 5.5, which delivers major enhancements in performance & scalability, availability and usability.

Watch Edward’s presentation  http://medianetwork.oracle.com/media/show/15664?n=subCategory&nid=35 

Apparently Benchmarks showed up to 1,561% performance gains for Read/Write operations on Windows, and up to 364% performance gain in Read/Write operations on Linux!: Higher availability: New semi-synchronous replication and replication Heart Beat improve the reliability of data and the speed of fail-over for continuous application availability. Improved usability: Enhanced index and table partitioning, signal/re-signal support and diagnostics further improve the usability of MySQL 5.5. 
Learn More and Get Going with MySQL 5.5: Download > MySQL 5.5 RC http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

uniCenta oPOS already works with early versions of MySQL and work is under-way preparing it to take advantage of the benefits of this Release Candidate.  So, keep an eye on events as this will provide a major boost to the performance of uniCenta oPOS in the enterprise.  

Friday 1 October 2010

Could this be the way or I don't understand. Need help - Part II

Refresher: In my last post I questioned why hotels keep batting, in what is clearly a lost match, for them, against the fall and continuing fall of in-room telephone provision. It's an odd one this, isn't it.

We all know that an hotel's bread & butter trade weekdays is business traveller related one way or another - Many corporate. Many not so corporate - and yet I sometimes wonder whether or not most operators actually grasp the situation and understand what has happened; what is happening; and what is going to happen. I'm still referring to telephony here but it is equally applicable to the general IT estate in hotels. Of course some do grasp it, and they really do it rather well, yet the majority still don't.

There are some "early adopters" - thanks Severin for your input about the Hoxton example here in London - but in the main it seems to me that "early adopter", in hotel-speak, concerning technology is something like five years after it's gone mainstream.
In fact, in my time dealing with hotel and leisure operators it's often been the case that ICT systems are relegated to a stuffy little back room or are tucked under-the-stairs usually barely enough room to swing that proverbial cat. A pretty good indication of the perceived value of ICT in the thought-train there then.

And yet, do you know what; it's refreshing to see there are more and more smart young (yes, I acknowledge you smart oldies too) operators whose familiarity and incorporation of ICT is setting the pace. For the "deniers" out there who think ICT begins and ends in the Back Office controlled by the FD and is not relevant to your hotel today, I just want to remind all of you poo-pooers of a) the Internet b) Wi-fi... I think that will do for the moment - and how you changed your mind (eventually) when you realised how much business was going to your competitors because you didn't provide.

Which conveniently brings me to the point of my post; How to exploit in-room guest telephone services.
Remember: you lost most of your call revenue to the mobile phone. Nero, Fiddle, Rome come to mind?
Can I ask. Do you want to start to get it some/all of it back? Get some more of that juicy secondary spend? Differentiate from your competition? Up your RevPar?
Well if you do; have you considered giving calls minutes away. I know some of you do that already. But, for how long and where? I know this too; usually up to an hour and when I'm a resident.

May be then you might want to consider extending your "reach" a wee bit.
May be then you could extend your reach and actually steal (legally of course) some of your competitors revenue without them even knowing about it.
Do you think this a tad too far-fetched? Hope you paused for thought here, and re-considered what I'm saying, because if I'm not wrong; isn't that what all the mobile phone operators did to you? Stole your in-room guest call revenue. Right from under your nose. Bet you didn't even bat an eye-lid, did you?

Consider this extract. Apologies to the original author as I can't remember where it came from;
Softphones are an ideal option for businesses with many mobile workers, because it allows travellers to take a laptop into a hotel room, log onto a Web portal and make and receive calls across the in-room high- speed Internet connection - just as if they were at their desk. Telecommuters can use the phones in a similar manner using their high-speed connections at home.
Now add - Anywhere to the above para'.

Can't be done? Wrong! Think again. Skype did it. So could you and there are plenty enough people out there who could help you do it...